I've got a webserver on a Linode 1024 VPS based on

• Ubuntu 11.10
• Nginx 1.0.5
• PHP 5.3.6 (with PHP-FPM, APC)
• Varnish 3.0.2

And a couple of blogs there based on WordPress 3.3.1. One of them is a plain blog, with the default config, theme and just the "Hello World" post, to test the server. The other one is a blog cloned from other server with almost 10k posts and over 10k comments. This blog has aroung 5k uniques per day.

The server gives good numbers on an ab test for the test blog, But the same test with the cloned blog is impossible to do: the ab test loads the server too much, and I have to stop the process, which anyway makes ab to show this really poor result.

The htop shows also a "normal" load when in normal operation, but anormal big load during the ab test.

There's another strange thing happening (the most important for me): the Time To First Byte is extremely high, but after that wait the site loads really fast. This can be easily tested with services such as tools.pingdom.com, which gives this result. Please pay attention to that yellow region that means "Wait time".

Why is this happening? Possible ideas:

• Bad PHP-FPM config
• Linode DNS response time is awful. Nonsense -the test blog resolves DNS fine, TTFB is fantastic
• Bad Nginx config

In case someone needs more info,

• Here you've got the current cloned blog nginx config file (/etc/nginx/sites-available/muycomputerpro.com)
• Here you've got the current my.cnf config (/etc/mysql/my.cnf) (I know, for the moment not caching, this hasn't make a difference on TTFB on the past)
• Here you've got the current PHP-FPM config (/etc/php5/fpm/pool.d/www.conf)

Good day.

While this post discusses a similar setup to mine serving blank pages occasionally after having made a successful installation, I am unable to serve anything but blank pages. There are no errors present in /var/log/nginx/error.log, /var/log/php-fpm.log or /var/log/nginx/us/sharonrhodes/blog/error.log.

My setup:

• Wordpress 3.0.4
• nginx 0.8.54
• php-fpm 5.3.5 (fpm-fcgi)
• Arch Linux

Configuration Files

php-fpm.conf:

[global]
pid = run/php-fpm/php-fpm.pid
error_log = log/php-fpm.log
log_level = notice

[www]
listen = 127.0.0.1:9000
listen.owner = www
listen.group = www
listen.mode = 0660
user = www
group = www

pm = dynamic
pm.max_children = 50
pm.start_servers = 20
pm.min_spare_servers = 5
pm.max_spare_servers = 35
pm.max_requests = 500

nginx.conf:

user www;
worker_processes  1;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log  notice;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;


events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}


http {
    include       mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;
    sendfile        on;
    keepalive_timeout  65;

    gzip  on;

    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*.conf;
}

/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/blog_sharonrhodes_us.conf:

upstream php {
    server 127.0.0.1:9000;
}

server {
    error_log /var/log/nginx/us/sharonrhodes/blog/error.log notice;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/us/sharonrhodes/blog/access.log;

    server_name blog.sharonrhodes.us;
    root /srv/apps/us/sharonrhodes/blog;
    index index.php;

    location = /favicon.ico {
            log_not_found off;
            access_log off;
    }

    location = /robots.txt {
            allow all;
            log_not_found off;
            access_log off;
    }

    location / {
            # This is cool because no php is touched for static content                                                                                        
            try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
            fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
            #NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini                                                                                          
            include fastcgi_params;
            fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
            fastcgi_pass php;
    }

    location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ {
            expires max;
            log_not_found off;
    }
}

/etc/nginx/conf/fastcgi.conf:

fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME    $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param  QUERY_STRING       $query_string;
fastcgi_param  REQUEST_METHOD     $request_method;
fastcgi_param  CONTENT_TYPE       $content_type;
fastcgi_param  CONTENT_LENGTH     $content_length;

fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_NAME        $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param  REQUEST_URI        $request_uri;
fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_URI       $document_uri;
fastcgi_param  DOCUMENT_ROOT      $document_root;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_PROTOCOL    $server_protocol;

fastcgi_param  GATEWAY_INTERFACE  CGI/1.1;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_SOFTWARE    nginx/$nginx_version;

fastcgi_param  REMOTE_ADDR        $remote_addr;
fastcgi_param  REMOTE_PORT        $remote_port;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_ADDR        $server_addr;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_PORT        $server_port;
fastcgi_param  SERVER_NAME        $server_name;

# PHP only, required if PHP was built with --enable-force-cgi-redirect                                                                                         
fastcgi_param  REDIRECT_STATUS    200;

I'm using WordPress with WP Super Cache. I want visitors who come from Google (That inlcudes all country specific referrers like google.co.in, google.co.uk and etc.) to see uncached contents.

There are my nginx rules which are not working the way I want:

server {
    server_name  website.com;
    location / {
        root   /var/www/html/website.com;
        index  index.php;
           if ($http_referer ~* (www.google.com|www.google.co) ) {
                   rewrite . /index.php break;
           }
           if (-f $request_filename) {
                   break;
           }
           set $supercache_file '';
           set $supercache_uri $request_uri;
           if ($request_method = POST) {
                   set $supercache_uri '';
           }
           if ($query_string) {
                   set $supercache_uri '';
           }
           if ($http_cookie ~* "comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_" ) {
                   set $supercache_uri '';
           }
           if ($supercache_uri ~ ^(.+)$) {
                   set $supercache_file /wp-content/cache/supercache/$http_host/$1index.html;
           }
           if (-f $document_root$supercache_file) {
                   rewrite ^(.*)$ $supercache_file break;
           }
           if (!-e $request_filename) {
                   rewrite . /index.php last;
           }
    }
    location ~ \.php$ {
            fastcgi_pass    127.0.0.1:9000;
            fastcgi_index   index.php;
            fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/html/website.com$fastcgi_script_name;
            include         fastcgi_params;
    }
}

What should I do to achieve my goal?

I have to install wordpress (One Blog, one domain, for e.g. mycompany.com/blog) on two servers sharing one database on a different server, these two servers are behind a loadbalancer and the db would be on another server. We are planning this way due to high traffic.

I have done standalone wordpress installations on a single server, on windows 2003, 2008 with IIS6, 7 etc

I am just researching as to how would I implement this.

What would be the steps to achieve this and upon searching I saw some posts regarding the wp-content/uploads directory to be synced at regular intervals ?

your help much appreciated Thanks for reading

What we did :

a) We have two web servers connected to a san cluster b) created a blog directory on the san c) Mapped that blog directory as a virtual directory on both webservers d) Installed wordpress on any one of them (as the domain and IIS virtual directories is the same for both servers - for e.g. www.abc.com) e) Database for this blog is located on two MySQL Boxes

as Wordpress is sitting on the san, so no conflicts with uploads or anything like that, Blog url is www.abc.com/blog and that's how it is configured on both.

Hope that helps someone !

I keep hearing about some PHP (opcode) caches like - APC, XCache, Memcache, eAccelerator, etc.

But I couldn't ever figure out how to go about choosing one. Apart from performance benefit, which a caching system is supposed to deliver, which other factors should be a point of concern.

Like why you will say X cache system is better than Y? I am less worried about relative performance gain. Small differences between any two systems matter less.

If a generic answer to my question is not possible, here are few pointers. I use dedicated VPS with Mediatemple (with root access). RAM is 512 MB (physical) + 400MB (swap) I am concerned about WordPress and its cousins WordPress-MU and BuddyPress. 90% of our codes/sites fall into WordPress family.

Thanks in advance for some help.